


endangered

by nezumiprefersdanielleovershakespeare



Category: No. 6 (Anime & Manga), No. 6 - All Media Types, No. 6 - Asano Atsuko
Genre: M/M, unfinished! please read note at beginning of fic!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-21
Updated: 2019-02-21
Packaged: 2019-11-01 12:50:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17867618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nezumiprefersdanielleovershakespeare/pseuds/nezumiprefersdanielleovershakespeare
Summary: Merman AU! Shion is a researcher of merpeople, an endangered species, and works on conservation efforts to help keep the merperson population from decreasing further. Nezumi, of course, is a merman.





	endangered

**Author's Note:**

> Hey cats! WARNING: This is an unfinished fic that I wrote about a year ago. I'm not going to be finishing it, so don't bother asking. I've just decided to post some of my unfinished fics that I've written and abandoned over the years because...well...I have quite a lot of them...(so so so many)....and why not!
> 
> So, read with caution, and as always, I hope you enjoy!

The study and conservation of endangered species was not a simple science, as Shion often had to explain in his lecture circuit the few weeks a year he took off from heading fieldwork operations. Shion had been working within a subdivision of Japan’s Ministry of the Environment since graduating university and was in line for promotion to head his subdivision despite being only twenty-seven years old – younger than most of his colleagues, though it helped that he’d gotten his PhD at the age of twenty. Shion didn’t care so much about being in charge but that it would eliminate the hoops he had to jump through to launch his own conservation initiatives – it helped too that he would no longer have to satisfy the current subdivision head, Hikari, who mandated all field work biologists do at least sixty hours of lecture circuiting per year.

           During Shion’s mandated lecture circuit, he traveled outside Japan to inform international conservation groups on his knowledge of endangered species. Shion covered the basics, such as that there were several guidelines, recognized globally, that designated the protocol for classifying a species as endangered species. Population was the main criteria, of course, but habitat was also involved. A particular species might have a healthy population in one area but be considered critically endangered in another area. The International Union for Conservation of Nature had designated a Red List of Threatened Species, which listed seven levels of endangerment severity, from “Least Concern” to “Extinct.”

           Shion glossed over this part of his talks and spent most of his lecture on his particular subdivision of conservation – The Japanese Unit for Merpeople Protection, or JUMP. JUMP was the top conservation group for merpeople worldwide, but even that was not enough to keep the international merpeople population from being extinct in every ocean but the Pacific Ocean. Even in the Pacific Ocean, the merpeople population still found itself in the Red List category called “Critically Endangered,” which, among other things, meant merpeople population had declined over eighty percent.

           Specifically, it had declined eighty-seven percent, from Shion’s calculations. The highest concentration of merpeople was off the eastern shores of Kyushu and the Ryukyu Islands in the Philippine Sea, so that was where Shion spent all of his time, when he wasn’t on his lecture circuit.

           And that was how Shion met Nezumi.

*

Merpeople were not nocturnal. They lived so deep underwater that sunlight could not reach them, and their internal clocks had no relation to the habits of the sun, were completely separate from the circadian rhythm of humans.

            Therefore, Shion’s colleagues kept to their normal sleeping habits, working during the day and sleeping at night, knowing the chances of spotting a merperson didn’t depend upon time. For that reason, Shion was the only one awake at one in the morning, three days after heading east from the shore of the northernmost Ryukyu Island. The side of the boat dug into the skin of his arms as he watched the crescent moon’s reflection on the ocean.

            Shion was not usually prone to moonwatching, a term his team usually saved for Chihiro, who was usually the one spending all-nighters drawn from sleep by the mesmerizing deep ink of the night sea. But that night, Shion was the one who hadn’t been able to fall asleep, leaving the bunk he shared with Koya to find himself on the deck.

            Shion noticed the change in the ocean’s surface immediately. He had studied merpeople for all his life – even as a kid, he’d enlisted Safu to watch merpeople documentaries that they found in the library. Shion knew exactly how the ripples of the water became disturbed from the surfacing of a merperson, not only from these documentaries and his studies, but because Shion had seen merpeople before.

            He’d seen twenty-one wild merpeople since he began doing field work for JUMP seven years before, and of course he’d seen and interacted with merpeople who consulted regularly with JUMP biologists along the shoreline, but a wild sighting was still incredible and noteworthy. Shion leaned further against the bow rail, and then the merperson surfaced not a yard from the bow of the boat, hair the same color as the inky ocean so that at first Shion couldn’t tell it apart but for the fact that it didn’t reflect moonlight.

            Like all merpeople, its skin was pale, almost transcluscent, from lack of exposure to light. Shion knew, though he couldn’t see it, that the merperson’s tail would be even darker than its hair – the color of the deepest depths of the sea, an absence of color really.

            The merperson raised a pale hand, pushed its seaweed-like clumps of wet hair off its pale skin where it had plastered, and only then did Shion see the merperson’s face. It was a face of sharp angles – cheekbones and nose and jaw and even its mouth seemed set in a sharp line, even its eyes were narrowed in near slits.

            Shion stayed quiet. He was fluent in mermish, the language of merpeople, but he knew better than to speak to one. They were a species of secrets. For humans to know of their language caused distrust, as if humans had stolen the language from the merpeople themselves – a fact Shion knew from experience, having severely angered the first merperson he’d ever met after greeting it with a simple, _Hello!_ in its native tongue.

            The merperson in the ocean was as silent as Shion. It watched him with careful observation just as Shion watched it back. Many merpeople knew what humans looked like, and Shion was aware he must look strange to them, with his abnormal appearance – red eyes, white hair, a strange scar.

            After a minute, which Shion counted silently in his head, he raised his hand in a small wave, then replaced it around the smooth metal bow railing that he gripped.

            The merperson watched the gesture impassively. For as different a species as merpeople were, they shared facial expressions, but this one’s face was blank, emotionless, no wrinkle in the smooth of its skin.

            Shion let go of the railing again. Pressed his hand flat to his own chest. “Shion,” he said softly, as he was supposed to.

            There was protocol for first-time merperson contact.

            Greet through gesture in a nonthreatening manner.

            State your name in a soft tone of voice.

            Ask – in Japanese, not mermish – if the merperson speaks Japanese. Many merpeople had this ability from coming to the surface occasionally to observe humans, though their Japanese was usually broken and primitive, with the hesitation and poor coherency of a child.

            “Do you speak Japanese?” Shion asked it, in Japanese, of course.

            The merperson continued to watch Shion in silence, then raised its hand up again, using two fingers to tuck its thick curtain of inky hair behind its ear. It had long fingers and big hands. It had an Adam’s apple and a strong jawline. It had wide shoulders, peeking up inches above the waterline. Shion concluded it was a merman, which was rare. Mermaids were generally both more aggressive and curious. They were the ones that came to the surface of the ocean. Shion had never seen a merman before.

            Shion turned over mermish words in his head, felt them like stones over his tongue that he knew he was not allowed to release. He swallowed them, spoke again in Japanese – slow Japanese, soft Japanese. The next step in the protocol was to inform the merperson of your purpose and JUMP’s mission.

            “This is my boat. I’m here with my team, Chihiro and Koya. We want to help you and other merpeople. We go on different missions to assist you. This mission is to aid the growth of underwater plants, which have been dying off too quickly. These plants feed the fish you eat. If we plant more, there will be more fish, and you will have more food. If me or my team is in these waters, that’s what we’re doing. You do not need to be afraid. We will never hurt you.”

            This was the general JUMP spiel, altered based on each particular mission. The most important part of the spiel was the last two lines. _You do not need to be afraid. We will never hurt you._ Shion said the words carefully, watched the merman take them in with his same lack of expression. Shion assumed he did not speak Japanese. This was not particularly unexpected. He spoke softly so that his intonation would say what his words could not.

            _You can trust me._

            JUMP had been discussing the idea of an on-shore conservation site to keep merpeople in captivity in order to prevent their extinction, but the idea would never reach fruition. The merpeople who consulted with JUMP biologists – around ten of them who could be counted on to appear on the shoreline a few times a year – refused to even consider the idea of living out of the ocean in a facility built by humans. While they had learned to trust humans enough to talk with them somewhat regularly – though never in mermish – that was where their trust dwindled. The consulting merpeople never gave information about merpeople, but asked about human life and tried to make their Japanese more fluent.

            Shion enjoyed talking to the consulting merpeople, but he preferred to be on the ocean. He had never received a response from a wild merperson, but he didn’t mind their silence. He understood that humans were not to be trusted. It was because of humans that merpeople were critically endangered in the first place.

            There was no protocol for what to say after the scripted spiel. No wild merperson ever stayed above the surface for the entire spiel in the first place, but this merman was still watching Shion even when Shion stopped speaking.

            The silence was broken only by the lapping waves crumbling against the side of the boat and Shion’s own breaths. He was acutely aware of his heartbeat, worried that it shook not only his chest but the boat itself, the entire ocean around the boat, the merman too.

            The merman, though otherwise unmoving, no longer narrowed his eyes, and Shion was able to see their color. They were a bright and unmistakable silver, a combination of the crescent moon and the black sea that mirrored it.

            Merpeople had black eyes, as if their pupils were always expanded to the edges of their irises. Shion had never seen a silver-eyed merperson, had never heard of one. He thought about his own eyes – red, abnormal for a human. They were both strange for their species, and Shion smiled at the thought of this.

            He didn’t realize he was smiling until he noticed the merman’s silver eyes lowering to rest on his lips. Shion reached up, touched his own lips, his own smile. While merpeople had the same facial expressions as humans, Shion had never seen one smile, even those that consulted occasionally with the JUMP biologists.

            _Bragging about happiness,_ a merperson had once explained in slow Japanese, _is human._

            “I was just thinking,” Shion said carefully, aware that he had no script now, “that we both have unusual eye colors. Mine are red, and humans don’t have red eyes. Yours are silver, and merpeople don’t have silver eyes.”

            The merman’s gaze slipped up from Shion’s lips to his own eyes again.

            “You understand what I’m saying, don’t you?” Shion asked, but the merman made no indication of confirmation.

            Wild merpeople were shy and fearful. Their fear was evident in the tense of their shoulders, in the clench of their jaws, in the wide of their eyes, in the quickness with which they dove back underwater before Shion could ever get through the entire protocol.

            This merman did not look afraid. He looked calm as the ocean surface, still as the moon in its perch, though Shion knew under the black of the water, his tail must have been swinging to and fro in order to keep him afloat.

            No human had ever seen a full merperson’s tail, though there had been glimpses, enough to know of the dark of the scales, enough to know the tails were enormous. Merpeople had torso’s the same sizes as humans, but their tails were thought to be between ten and twenty feet long. Even the merpeople who allowed JUMP biologists to consult with them every so often refused to show their tails.

            “Shion?”

            Shion didn’t turn his head at the call of his name behind him. Koya’s voice was groggy, soft from sleep, and Shion assumed he’d woken to find the top bunk empty, would be up to the deck to look for Shion at any moment.

            Shion watched the merman, scared to let him out of his sight. This merman wasn’t like the other wild merpeople. This merman stayed. This merman was not afraid. This merman had silver eyes.

            “I have to go,” Shion said quickly. “Will you meet me here tomorrow night?”

            He remembered that time didn’t function for merpeople in the same way and reconsidered his words, then pointed at the sky, to the crescent moon.

            “The next time the moon is bright like this, and the sky is dark like this, will you come back to the surface of the water?”

            He did not know if the merman understood him, not to mention if he understood the Japanese words for _moon_ and _sky_ , but he couldn’t risk speaking mermish – this merman might have been different than the others, but Shion was not foolish enough to think he trusted him.

            The merman remained expressionless, and then Shion could hear the sound of the door from the cabin creaking open, and the merman was slipping soundlessly beneath the ocean surface, hardly a ripple left in his place.

            “Taking over Chihiro’s moonwatching shift? Come inside, you’ll be exhausted tomorrow,” Koya said, next to Shion in the next moment, but he too leaned against the bow railings, looked out at the ocean. “Waxing crescent,” he said, after a moment.

            Shion didn’t bother looking up at the moon in the sky. He preferred its reflection where it was tossed on the surface of the ocean, shimmering and alive, as if it too might slip underwater at any moment and disappear, soundless.

*

Shion spent the day thinking about the strange silver eyes. He didn’t tell Chihiro or Koya about the merman, unsure why he kept the late-night encounter from his colleagues as well as the journal where they were supposed to record all wild merpeople sightings, but he did ask about the eyes.

            “Have either of you ever heard of a merperson having an eye color other than black?” Shion looked down at his bowl of rice Koya had cooked for them in his battery-powered rice cooker that always overcooked the rice on the bottom of the pot and undercooked the rice at the top.

            Shion mixed the charred rice, brown and crispy, with the mushy white rice in his bowl with his chopsticks, and glanced up to see Koya and Chihiro mixing their own rice.

            Chihiro lifted a chopstick to her lips, licked off a few grains of rice before taking the chopstick from her mouth and responding. “Are you talking about the myth?”

            Shion felt his eyebrows crease. “What myth?”

            “The lightning thing?” Koya asked, glancing at Chihiro.

            “Yeah, I thought everyone knew about that.”

            “What lightning eyes?” Shion asked, leaning forward, placing his bowl of rice on the wooden floor of the rocking boat in front of his crossed ankles. It was late afternoon, suppertime. Usually Chihiro caught fish to go with Koya’s rice, but that day they hadn’t gotten back up from their ocean dive until late, when the sun had beat down on the surface of the ocean all day and the fish had long since dived down too deep for Chihiro’s casted line to tempt.

            Chihiro raised an eyebrow. “Want to tell it, Koya?”

            Koya tapped his chopsticks against the rim of his bowl, chewed on his bottom lip. “Well, it’s just a myth, people in JUMP love telling it, so I’m surprised you haven’t heard it. The oldest family of merpeople, it’s said they used to live on both land and sea, favored the shoreline between both their worlds and would communicate even with the dinosaurs.”

            “Dinosaurs?” Shion asked, frowning. “Merpeople evolved at the same time as humans.”

            “It’s a myth, remember?” Chihiro said, pointing a chopstick at him. “You have to tell it with the dinosaurs, that’s how it’s always told.”

            “Anyway,” Koya said, letting his chopsticks rest in his bowl and leaning back, his palms against the floor of the boat by his hips, “they were lounging in the shallows of the Philippine Sea, on the shore of one of the islands, and a storm began. And they loved storms, when they could lay on the surface of the water, the ocean at their backs and the water from the sky against their faces.”

            Chihiro hummed in agreement, and Shion crossed his arms. Nothing about this myth sounded plausible. Merpeople hated the surface of the water, and the few that ventured up never did so in storms. The storms rocked the oceans, tore at the surface of the water. Merpeople preferred to be down deep in the sea, where there was no sign of the crashing waves above.

            “During one particularly bad storm, lightning struck the sea. It turned the eyes of all the merpeople silver, and their tails too. A brilliant silver, and it was beautiful, and they weren’t harmed, so they didn’t think anything of it. The merpeople who weren’t at the surface were jealous, wanted the silver eyes and silver scales on their tails, so they mated with the lightning kind, and their offspring were half-breeds. Some of the offspring had only silver eyes, some had only silver tails.”

            “You’ve really never heard of this before?” Chihiro asked.

            The boat rocked quietly under them, such a familiar feeling Shion hardly noticed it anymore. He noticed more being on solid ground, the land too sturdy beneath his feet, strange in that way.

            Shion shook his head. Looked back at Koya, who was chewing a mouthful of rice, but he swallowed and continued.

            “At first, the silver scales seemed like signs of luck, fortune. But it wasn’t long before the lightning-branded merpeople were being killed off. Their tails were like bright neon signs underwater, and predators found them easily. It’s said that none of them survived, none of the original lightning-struck ones, and none of the half-breeds with silver tails. Some of the silver-eyed merpeople are said to remain, but they stay down in the deepest depths of the ocean, the most distrustful of the surface out of any merpeople.” Koya raised his eyebrows when he finished, and Shion shrugged, knowing Koya was awaiting some response.

            “I see why it’s called a myth,” he said. “None of that was plausible.”

            “Well, yeah. There’s no lightning-eyed merpeople. It’s just a fun story,” Koya said, shrugging back and sliding Chihiro’s unfinished bowl of rice towards himself to finish off.

            “You brought it up,” Chihiro reminded, chewing on the end of a chopstick. “Why’d you ask?”

            It was policy to report all merpeople sightings. It was important, it was data, it was necessary for the JUMP initiative to know all information on merpeople as possible, especially when they came to the surface, how they reacted, if it was a merman or a mermaid. A merman sighting, particularly, was incredibly rare. There had only been two documented cases by other JUMP biologists. Even all of the merpeople that consulted with JUMP biologists on the shoreline were mermaids, not mermen.

            Shion had never been one to keep secrets. He shared everything with his team, and he knew either of them would have told them had they seen a merman in the middle of the night.

            “I don’t know. Just curious,” Shion said, and Chihiro laughed, stretched out her foot to poke Shion’s knee.

            “You’re always curious.”

            “We should clean up,” Koya announced, standing up and stretching. “It’s late, we have a long day tomorrow.”

            “Every day is a long day,” Chihiro said, standing up as well.

            “That’s why we should go to bed earlier every day, I don’t know why I keep letting you people keep me up late.”

            Shion stood up, emptying his bowl into the rice cooker for breakfast the next morning. He washed the dishes with his team, brushed his teeth, toed off his shoes and peeled off his socks and changed into a t-shirt and sweats, then watched his team walk around the cabin, readying themselves for bed.

            “I think I’ll just head up to the deck, get some fresh air.”

            “Again?” Koya asked, climbing up to his bunk overtop Shion’s.

            Chihiro was already lying on the bunk across from theirs. She slept on the top, and they all had piled their belongings on the bottom bunk. The cabin was small, but they were used to it, and Shion preferred that JUMP use its funds on merpeople conservation missions rather than bigger boats with better amenities.

            “Turn off the light when you leave the cabin,” Chihiro murmured, already sounding half asleep, and Shion understood – he too felt the fatigue of diving miles into the ocean weighing down on his bones. He knew his body needed rest after a day like he’d had, but he knew even more so that he’d never fall asleep knowing there was a chance – however small it might have been – that the merman from the night before would return.

            Shion turned off the lights in the cabin as he climbed barefoot up the few wooden steps that led up to the deck. He shut the cabin door behind him, let the dim light of the slim moon lead his steps out to the edge of the deck where he stood against the railing as he had the night before.

            It was hardly midnight, earlier than it’d been the night before when the merman had appeared, and Shion was prepared to wait an hour or more for a sign of him, but he didn’t even have to wait a full two minutes before the water he was watching rippled, and then a head appeared, pale fingers surfacing next, pushing hair out of eyes as the torso rose so that an inch or two more of the merman’s shoulders and arms were visible than the night before.

            Shion could see his collarbones, the pale skin stretched over the hollows of them. His arms were muscular but thin, like any swimmers’ arms, like any merperson’s arms. His hair was incredibly long, fell over his pale skin like the night sky dripping down over his body, plunging into the sea. Shion wondered just how long his hair was, if it fell past the human portion of the merman down to the tail.

            “You came back,” Shion said, forgetting to keep his voice soft, forgetting the protocol completely – not that protocol applied anymore, because this was not a first-meet. This was a second, and there were never second meetings with wild merpeople besides the consultants, but those were elder mermaids, the most powerful merpeople, the leaders of the families.

            Shion could see clearly this merman was young. The aging process of merpeople was largely unknown, like most facts about the species, but it was a general consensus that they had over three times the natural life span of humans.

            Even so, if Shion were to guess his age solely with the influence of the merman’s human features, he appeared to be around Shion’s own age. In any case, very young for a merperson coming up to the surface. Younger than most merpeople who peeked above sea-level.

            Shion waited for a reply, but like the night before, the merman was quiet, did nothing but watch Shion with eyes that were – Shion had to admit – a lot like lightning.

            Shion considered sharing the myth with this merman, then decided against it. He felt his fatigue pushing down his shoulders and leaned heavily against the bow railing.

            “I’m jealous of your stamina. I was only in the water for eight hours today, and I feel like I could collapse,” Shion admitted to the silent merman. “Do you mind if I sit?”

            The merman was floating about a yard away from the front of the boat. Shion received no response from him, but he hadn’t expected one. He lowered himself slowly, watching the merman for any sign of fear, and then he was sitting on the edge of the boat, legs dangling over the front edge of the bow, folding his arms over the bow railing that fell across his stomach, preventing him from falling forward into the ocean. His bare feet swung inches from the lapping ocean, and Shion saw the merman staring at them.

            “They’re called feet,” Shion offered, after letting the merman stare for a moment with his silver eyes, and the eyes flicked up to Shion’s face, then back to his feet again. Shion found himself relieved that the merman was distracted by his feet. It gave him a chance to look at the merman without being looked at right back, and Shion thought the merman’s expression had softened. There were still the same hard lines, but his lips were parted, his head tilted a fraction.

            He was curious.

            Shion bit the inside of his cheek, then wiggled his toes, and the merman jerked back a few inches with the swift sound of rippling water, sinking lower into the sea until his arms and shoulders were almost hidden completely.

            He stared up at Shion, his eyes narrowed, and Shion found himself biting his cheek harder, trying not to laugh but unable to help himself, and he lifted his hand, covered his lips and tried to muffle the sound of his laugh.

            “Sorry,” he breathed, lowering his hand. “I didn’t mean to startle you. Those are toes. Like fingers of the feet,” Shion added, holding up one of his hands and wiggling his fingers the way he’d wiggled his toes.

            The merman’s eyes lingered on his fingers, fell back to his toes, then returned to Shion’s face – his lips, and Shion realized he was still smiling.

            He let the merman look at his smile. Shion had always loved seeing wild merpeople, but he’d never felt the way he did now, a happiness like this – more than just accomplishment, more than just amazement, more than just awe. He felt content, he felt relaxed, he felt like he was

 where he was supposed to be, that everything in his life had led him to this moment.

            It was not a feeling Shion understood, but he didn’t care to dissect it at that moment. He didn’t want anything distracting him from the merman, even his own feelings.

            Shion reached down, lifted his leg a few inches, pressed the tip of his forefinger to his toes. “These are toes,” he said, trailing his finger up, “this is the foot,” he twisted his foot, “this is the heel, this is the arch of the foot, above the foot here is the ankle.”

            Little was known about merpeople but that they were distrustful, and that they craved knowledge. Shion wanted to give this merman information. Continued up his leg, presenting his calf to the merman as he pulled up the leg of his sweatpants, pointing out his knee, trying to bunch his sweats as high as they would go to uncover a few inches of his thigh to present to the merman, who watched in silence with eyes that followed Shion’s finger.

            Shion rolled down his pantleg after the thigh, chewed on his lip and tried to think of something else to show the merman.

            “I think all of our other body parts are the same. Well, not all of them, but all of them that I can show you right now,” Shion corrected. It had occurred to him that the merman knew no Japanese at all, that Shion was merely talking to himself, but he didn’t mind this as much as he should have. The merman seemed fully focused, his attention pressed intently onto Shion, and whether or not Shion made sense to him seemed irrelevant.

            Shion paused, listening to the silence of the night and the ocean, thinking about what else he might talk about to this merman who doubtfully understood him. In his pause, the merman rose both hands, began gathering his hair over one shoulder, and Shion forgot he was supposed to be thinking of something to say as he watched the merman begin to braid his hair.

            It was not quite the same sort of braid humans did, not quite the same braid he’d seen Safu plait into her own hair back before she cut it too short to braid anymore. The merman’s fingers moved swiftly, in a pattern Shion didn’t have a hope of following, and the braid produced seemed to have dozens of weaves per inch.

            The merman’s hands disappeared under water as he continued to braid the length of hair below his shoulders. Shion didn’t speak, and the merman didn’t seem to mind his silence any more than he minded his words. He watched Shion for a while as he braided, then looked around – at the boat, then at the sky, his silver eyes moving swiftly as if there was a specific star he was searching for when Shion knew merpeople likely had no knowledge of stars, with a preference for the deepest levels of the ocean where light could not reach.

            Shion considered pointing out constellations for the merman, but he wasn’t sure of any other than the Little and Big Dipper. Koya knew much more about the skies, had almost become an astronaut before he realized he preferred to explore the black depths of the sea over the sky.

            It was a while before the merman stopped braiding. He hadn’t caught all of his hair in his braid, several clumps still loose and sticking to his skin, plastered rivers of black that he didn’t seem to notice, but Shion did. Shion was sure he could notice everything about this merman if he was given the chance to, but he wouldn’t be given the chance to because mermen had no business being on the surface for so long – especially ones so young, and Shion wondered not for the first time what the merman’s family thought of his disappearances.

            “Isn’t your family worried that you’re gone so long?” Shion asked, not expecting an answer, asking simply to get the question out of his head, add some sound to the quiet night.

            Merpeople had tight family units. They stuck together, the mermaids the primary aggressors and explorers, fighting away predators, venturing to all corners of the ocean including its surface to search for new sources of food. Mermen were the caretakers, tending to the merkids when the mermaids were away, raising the merkids while the mermaids were often gone for months at a time, having to travel farther and farther for food now that it was more and more scarce, sometimes starving before they could return to their families.

            A merman young as this one would be noticed when absent. It was likely he had younger siblings to care for, or that an older sibling was meant to be looking after him, was panicked at his every disappearance. If the merman’s mother knew he had gone to the surface of the ocean for two nights in a row, Shion couldn’t imagine the reaction, but it wouldn’t be good. Mermen were to be protected. They were much scarcer in number than mermaids, needed to be kept safe to ensure the species could continue.

            JUMP didn’t have exact numbers, but Shion and his colleagues assumed there were no more than fifty mermen total left in the entire population, while the mermaids may have numbered closer to a couple hundred, even a thousand.

            The merman’s eyes narrowed at Shion’s question, and he tried to clarify so it wouldn’t sound like he was prying or trying to get information.

            “It’s just, I know if I were missing for two nights, my mother would worry. I’m twenty-seven, and she still worries about me, calls me every morning even though she knows I rarely have signal,” Shion offered, thinking only afterward that it was unlikely the merman could understand concepts like _calls_ or _signal_.

            The merman blinked his lightning-colored eyes, his expression softening again, though not completely as it had before. He was wary, and Shion couldn’t figure out how to put the merman at ease. How to make him come back tomorrow night.

            It was his question, he assumed, that had put the merman on edge. They liked information, not investigation. They liked to gain secrets, but not to give them.

            Shion swung his feet gently, noting when the merman glanced at them again. “My mother, her name is Karan. She owns a bakery. It’s where I grew up, and when I’m away from it, I can’t help but wish I was there. I’m not unhappy, I love working for JUMP, I love being on the ocean, but I miss the warmth of the kitchen, I miss working with my hands, I miss talking to customers. I miss my mother,” Shion admitted, speaking quietly. “Is that childish?”

            The merman tucked strands of his wet hair behind his ear. Said nothing.

            “Humans leave their families at young ages. We’re supposed to. That’s how we grow, we leave home, we leave our parents, and we make new families by forming bonds with outsiders. But I’ve never felt any urge to form a close bond with anyone outside of my old family. My mother and my best friend, Safu. I don’t know how I could love anyone the way I love them,” Shion said, knowing that merpeople understood love, this was a concept they claimed to know to a capacity even greater than humans could fathom it.

            The merpeople who consulted with JUMP biologists shook their heads when the biologists talked about love and tried to define it.

            _The strongest passionate attachment to another person. An emotional bond, unbreakable. Desire and selflessness._

            To that, the merpeople frowned. _To humans, everything is breakable, everything is selfish. Human love is simple, silly._

            Though Shion was fluent in mermish, he did not know the mermish word for _love._ They had a separate word for “human love,” a word that meant a simple attraction, a simple attachment. They had another word for what they considered “real love,” but it had never been documented by any previous JUMP biologists, it had never been heard by human ears.

            “I’ve always felt drawn to the sea, anyway. Maybe the ocean is meant to be my new family,” Shion mused, peeking at the merman, who watched back calmly.

            Shion rested his chin on his arms that were hooked over the railing. He could have closed his eyes and fallen asleep right there, knowing the merman was watching him.

            “I should go to bed, I don’t want to be exhausted during tomorrow’s work. Will you come back tomorrow night?” he asked, but the merman didn’t answer – of course he didn’t.

            Instead, he looked at Shion a moment more, then slipped back down under the surface of the water. Shion watched until the ripples calmed in his absence before he hauled himself up from the edge of the boat and returned to the cabin, where his team was fast asleep.

*

 

**Author's Note:**

> If you didn't read the note at the beginning of the fic, go back and read it now!


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